This is a very interesting debate on a very important subject. My constituency has three universities in it, so it's very important that we get this right, not just for individual areas but also for the whole of Wales, because obviously we need to ensure that we have the best possible tertiary sector to take us forward in these very challenging sets of circumstances.

The University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the University of Helsinki in Finland and Mondragon University in Spain all have one thing in common: they all have democratic governance. They all meet Tony Benn's five tests of democratic accountability for those at the very top of their universities: what power have you got, where did you get it from, in whose interests do you exercise it, to whom are you accountable, and, most importantly, how can we get rid of you. So, it's obviously important to ask how does this Bill address the governance and the strengthening of the governance of our universities, given some of the quite high-profile problems that there have been in many of our universities, and ensuring that universities have the very best leadership with the widest range of expertise to go with it.

Over the weekend, I chaired a meeting in Llandudno that was all about remote working. There was an excellent presentation by Professor Alan Felstead of Cardiff University, which set out the complexity of the decisions that any university is having to make in our post-pandemic world, and on top of which we have a climate emergency looming. So, for example, is it right to go on building lots more buildings when many students are going to be working remotely from home for a lot of their work, as are the tutors? So, how do we prevent us building white elephants when we're not absolutely certain about the way in which we're going to be both studying and working in the future?

We need to ensure that we have the best possible governance and that we don't make decisions that can, potentially, bring universities down. For example, Aberystwyth University made some pretty disastrous investments in a campus in Mauritius, costing them about £1 million, based on an assumption that there would be very large numbers of students wanting to enrol. And when that didn't happen, it potentially could have been very serious for the future of the university. Happily, they've recovered, but practically every university you can think of has had some really challenging problems to face in the past.

So, I want to understand how this Bill is aligned with the social partnership and procurement Bill that we're going to be scrutinising in due course, and what the Welsh Government means by 'regulating with autonomy'. I'm struggling to see where we go in the explanatory memorandum. We've got quite a lot of information about the governance of the commission for tertiary education, but I'm not at all clear how this might improve the governance of our universities in the sense of that critical friend that all democratic institutions need to have, in order to ensure the consideration of the full range of views that take into account the interests of staff, students and the wider community. So, how is this Bill going to ensure that universities have the very best governance? And what is the role that you think the commission is going to have? It's clear that you want the commission to improve our research institutions and their reputation, but it's not at all clear how they're going to do that if we don't address the governance of universities.